The future belongs to crowds: The only viable mental model for an AI powered team
Bernard Gotfryd, Don DeLillo, Author, NYC [i.e. New York City], July 1988, color transparency, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-gtfy-01085, no known restrictions on publication.
In 2016, when I was at art school, I became really interested in the American author Don DeLillo.
For me, DeLillo seems to write in a space beyond the printed word, and more in a kind of half-technological space too. His sentences often feel as if they are not just describing the world, but picking up the signals running underneath it.
One quote from Mao II has stayed with me: “The future belongs to crowds.”
What I like about this line is that it cuts against a very common organisational instinct: the instinct to centralise everything under one person, or to wait until the people at the top have figured everything out. This is especially true when teams are dealing with AI transformation, but I think that instinct is wrong.
Transformation cannot come only from the top. In order to work, transformation has to come from the bottom and the top at the same time. The people at the top have as little idea where all this is going as the people at the bottom. And perhaps because they are custodians of fundamentally legacy systems, maybe the people at the top have an even worse idea of where things are going.
You might say that in order to succeed we need to bring the bottom closer to the top.
There may well be a darker political story here: a future divided between people who tell machines what to do, and people who are told what to do by machines, but inside teams, the immediate lesson is simpler: the future belongs to crowds.
In practical terms, this means saying something uncomfortable to leadership: don’t hold the information. Don’t hold back news about when things are going to be released to teams. Don’t try to strategise in isolation and then force that strategy onto a team.
This is not a plan for a campaign. This is not a plan for a webinar series. This is not something we can simply plan for in the old way.
We are talking about a technology that has already transformed language itself: the way we write, the way we think, how we process information, how we communicate with each other. And I don’t think it is possible to come up with the perfect set of guidelines, or the perfect way to work with AI, and then expect that to hold up.
The answer can only really come from everybody. From the teams. From the people using the tools, breaking them, misunderstanding them, remaking their workflows around them, finding strange new uses for them before anyone has had time to turn those uses into policy.
So when I say, “the future belongs to crowds,” what I’m really saying is: don’t try to exert control over something that is totally uncontrollable.
We have to join hands across the entire team and walk into the uncertainty together.
